Monday 28 January 2002 06.45 EST
First published on Monday 28 January 2002 06.45 EST

The hunger-striking inmates of Australia's most notorious detention centre finally made headlines around the world last week when news broke of how a number had sewn their lips together.

Similarly desperate protests have been going on for the last three years in the six secure camps where Australia sends anyone who enters the country without the required visa. Although detainees have sewn their mouths up before, the painful stitching of coarse thread through lips was finally seized upon by the world's media as a potent symbol of these migrants' helplessness and powerlessness.

One of the reasons the Australian government has so successfully sold the idea of mandatory detention to the vast majority of voters is because of its mastery of the media coverage of its detention centres.

The media are banned from entering the centres, except on occasional, anodyne official visits. Detainees have described how during these visits "troublemakers" are shielded from meeting the media and the camps are scrubbed up to look their best. Journalists are forbidden from talking to any of the inmates.

Woomera is 595 km (370 miles) north of Adelaide, the nearest city with a tangible broadcasting and press presence. In the past, it has been several days before news of disturbances inside the centre have reached the media.

Few friendly visitors or refugee groups make the arduous trek to the centre - making it difficult for journalists to enter as a "visitor" (as many have done at Villawood detention centre in western Sydney). Helicopters are banned from flying over the centre and while the longest lens can pick out protestors through the barbed wire, their voices can only be heard over hurried telephone calls, which migrants fear making in case they are discovered by the guards.

On Saturday, a special Australian police unit waited until nightfall before swooping on a large media group that had been camped outside the centre for a week. The press were aggressively directed 500 yards further away from the centre. They are now 1km from the perimeter fence.

One journalist working for the ABC, Australia's national broadcaster, was arrested and charged with failing to leave Commonwealth property. The ABC has said it will vigorously contest the charge.

The immigration department denied it had authorised the move of the media, but Australian journalists fear it is another attempt to minimise the reporting of asylum seekers inside the controversial centres. The authorities argue that the media pose a security risk and often incite protests inside the camps.

Keeping the media away from Australia's detention centres is an expensive and arduous business. Happily for the Australian government it has found its "Pacific solution" - sending all new unauthorised boat arrivals to have their claims assessed in camps on Pacific islands - is much more conducive to a media blackout.

What could be a more impenetrable detention centre than one on a sovereign eight square mile island, 2,500 miles from anywhere, that can control its own borders and decide who enters the country without question? The government of Nauru, where 1,118 refugees are encamped, has refused to issue any visas to journalists for the last three months. It also refuses to give an explanation.

Nearly 300 Afghan migrants who became international news when they were rescued by the Norwegian freighter, the Tampa, and refused entry into Australia, are still waiting to hear whether they will be given refugee status and where they will go. But, six months on, after an initial flurry of coverage, their voices and stories have still not been heard. All the press can rely on are reports from aid agencies, who suggest that six months of uncertainty in the tropical heat has made mental state of many in the two Nauru camps a cause for concern.

The Australian government says that if detainees' names or pictures are published in a national or international newspaper it can interfere with their claim for refugee status. The migrant given media exposure can subsequently argue that the coverage has put their life in danger if they were returned to their homeland, so they are granted refugee status whereas before they may not have been.

Detainees have used these arguments in the past and UNHCR officials in Australia support the government's reasoning here.

But its effect is that, denied a human face and voice, the demonisation of migrants by the government and rightwing talk radio opinion-formers can continue. And so the refugees continue to be driven to stabbing desperately symbolic stitches into their mouths.